06-04-21

Friday

Fishing light in the morning light

Today I made a fishing journey. Despite my previous words on the subject that you should stay at home. I even left the province of Blekinge. But I can defend it with that this journey mostly was about family business. But I do try to combine it with fishing. Therefore I started pretty early in the morning. 
One of the purposes with this whole idea of a fishing diary or journal is to showcase the landscape, nature and animal life of Sweden. And today, at last, I can proudly present a real Swedish bird.

Here it is! A pheasant! And I promise I will do all in my power to keep away from all kinds of jokes of this rare bird's tail and some trout flies! I try to avoid rolling myself in that kind of cheap jokes and bad puns! But to be honest I don't think this bird was really wild. On the contrary it jumped up on the catwalk like an experienced photo model as soon it saw my camera. Talk about swagger! And furthermore just before my very eyes two hares were eating grass. Yes hares and not rabbits. I got a picture of one of them but enough is enough of this tedious nature stuff. Unfortunately the real animal life I came for, that is fish, didn't come close to the abundance in the place's parking lot! Now a little about the place itself. It is called Landön. It may sound gibberish in your foreign ears of course but let's analyze it a bit. It consists of two separate words, right. "Land" which means land in English and probably is derived from an old Indo-European word, common in that family of languages. Now that wasn't too hard, right?

Then we have the word "ö". Which means "island". The letter "ö" in our language is always pronounced as the vocal in "her".  So "Landön" means something in between land and island.  The Island of Land? I think it wasn't too long ago it really was an island, but close to the mainland. Now it is a small peninsula. There is a beach, camping ground, and a tiny little village and some summer cottages around. Lots and lots of people come here in the summer, I suppose. 
This is how it looked in the morning when I had finished breakfast in my car and was on my way to the fishing ground:

Here I'm looking to the west and it's pretty early in the morning. Lately a very consistent wind from that quarter had blown and I thought that heavy winds would be my biggest problem today. But the problem was exactly the opposite. Dead calm. And not just in the morning which is not that unusual, but it continued almost the whole of the day. The worst kind of weather for a fisherman. 
As you well can imagine by looking at the picture, here is vast areas to fish through but in most parts it's too shallow and sandy bottom. But with the right conditions at hand you might take a pike or two. Now in early springtime it is also possible to get a sea trout. If you're very lucky. And soon, the most terrible fish of all will invade this shallow bay and make all serious fishing impossible. Yes, I'm referring to that awful menace of the garfish! First of May is the red flag day. The nicest thing I can say about that long, silvery troublesome fish is that it is very punctual. 

You have to walk a bit to get to the starting point. Well, of course you can start fishing where you want but I prefer to start a bit away. Anyway, there runs a little brook that you have to cross over. But it's no problem because it's more like a ditch. You see that little bridge? It has a special name. Can you guess what? Exactly! The Landön Bridge! Ha, ha, very funny, I think! This is more like the cheap puns and bad taste jokes I like to roll myself in! It's an old joke of mine but with a new audience it's recyclable (is that really a word? Recyclable? But my spelling program don't protest. How do you pronounce it?) Now, back to the fishing: Which was very bad on that side of the peninsula. I didn't even get a bite. Nor did I see or scared away a fish in all the vast area. Probably because of the lack of wind. But it is tricky to fish for pike now in springtime. And I go to Landön once a year or once in two years so I cannot follow the fish.  Also I had some problem with short bits of seaweed floating around in the surface causing me some mutterings and gritting of teeth.

I spent about two or three hours wading around fishing on that side before I gave it all up and slowly got back to the base camp. Which always is my car. There I took a little rest and had myself a nice cup of tea. I sat there waiting for some kind of wind to come to the rescue. It's very unusual with a whole day without even the lightest breeze. A peninsula consists of two sides. Here was one facing to the west and the other to the east. But the east side is more like an inside with even more vast shallow sandy areas and a couple of small islands. By the way, the whole area must be great for bird watchers because there's a multitude of them. Birds, I mean. Specially such as I, waders. 

And boy, did I wade!?  Yes I did. A very great and long distance.  I had a bit of luck. A happy coincidence one may call it even. That two favorably factors happened to beam together at the same short period of time.  The first one was that at last a small, tiny, faint little wind began to blow very shyly. It hardly could rustle a single dead leaf but it just managed to ripple the otherwise dead calm water surface. The second was that I came to the only spot around that held some fish.  Three pikes had a little meeting in an area not bigger than about five square meters. One of them was even fairly big with its six kilo. All three were very nice and taken on one of the three flies shown in the last journal. On the picture you can catch a glimpse of my old ABU Diplomat 145 fly reel And a pretty nice photo it is, if I may say so. It's fairly difficult to get nice pictures of the fish in the water which is the way my pikes often are shown. With this camera I now have I can't put on a polarizing lens like I could on the old one. Therefore it's a big problem with water reflections. And often I find it hard to get the real size of the pike to show.   Sometimes I take the pike out of the water to take, what I call an idol picture of it but I try to avoid it for the sake of the pike. Although I think it takes no real harm of

that treatment. I try to lay it on wet weeds or grass and make the photo session as short as possible. 
At the time of the catches I didn't know that the other areas was empty of fish, of course and I fished happily on. And then the wind died, Mary. Sorry, another Jimi Hendrix near-quotation. 
But if there were more pikes around I would've noticed it. They might not have struck but I would surly have seen one or two come following after the fly. Or I had seen some run away from me when I came too close. 
As you can see in the statistic table below I used the light equipment today. I hope to continue to do so for a while. The new variation of the White Pike Sara worked very well in the casting. And of course in the retrieving, as also is shown in the table.